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The labour aristocracy and opportunism in the history of Australian working-class politics

By Jonathan
Strauss

The theory of
the labour aristocracy argues that opportunism in the working class has a
material basis. Such class-collaborationist politics express the interests of a
relatively privileged stratum of workers who receive benefits supported by
monopoly superprofits. Karl Marx and, especially, Frederick Engels, first
developed this theory. It is most closely associated with V.I. Lenin, however,
for whom it became “the pivot of the tactics in the labour movement that
are dictated by the objective conditions of the imperialist era”.[1]

This article,
the last of five,[2]
discusses the development in Australia
of concessions from monopoly superprofits to the labour aristocracy and of
opportunism in politics in the Australian working class.

Concessions from monopoly
superprofits and the development of opportunism

From the middle
of the nineteenth century, contemporary observers of Australia
noted its high wage levels, eight-hour working days, exceptional rates of
unionisation (union density) and formal democratic rights. The country was
often described as a “working man’s paradise”. While the fin de siecle economic depression and industrial strife made that
description less tenable, the restoration of lost conditions during the first
decades of the new century led to a view that the country was a social
laboratory. The experiments were new or renewed state interventions in economic
activity, the setting of industrial and labour market standards, welfare
provision—through public works, factory legislation, pensions, workers’
compensation and the regulation of wages and hours of work, to which systems of
union recognition were tied—and the formation of governments by an ostensibly
working-class party, the ALP.

Labour
historians’ initial efforts to examine this period were primarily devoted to
establishing the existence of labour movement struggles and their influence on
workers’ conditions of life. Such historians only more recently concerned
themselves with: the restriction of these benefits; their distribution along,
for example, gender and racial lines and, more generally, their structuring as
a “wage-earners’ welfare state”;[3]
the limits of the labour movement’s responsibility for the measures taken by
the state; and the limited effect of the state’s actions on, for example, the
growth of unionisation. However, these concerns have been raised together with
references to relatively low wage differences between skilled and unskilled
workers, the inclusiveness of the eight-hour-day movement, the effects of
changes in the labour process on the exclusiveness of skilled work and
industrial militancy and political progressiveness among sections of skilled workers.[4]
Labour historiography still understood the principal trend in the politics of
the working class to be one towards a unity effective for the common interests
of the class. Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright, for example, wrote: “‘White
Australia’ was a shackle on the labour movement’s progress to maturity”.[5]

Labour
historiography assessed the formation and development of the ALP in this context. Its more critical
judgments said the party blocked, or even temporarily reversed, the trend of
working-class advance. Humphrey McQueen suggested that the party was an effort
“by wage-labourers and small proprietors to resist their proletarianisation”.
This effort created a “petit-bourgeois” response to monopolisation within the
labour movement, which consisted of chauvinism and socialism defined as an
expansion of state activities. He said only the actions of militants produced a
contrasting proletarian consciousness.

Tom Bramble claimed
union officials created the ALP at the turn of the century in a search “for more
effective representation”. He discussed how theparty “was a product both of the strength
of the working class movement, in that workers voted en masse for their own class-aligned party, but also of its weakness in that strike defeats in the
early 1890s had sapped their ability to mobilise on the ground and allowed
reformist union officials and politicians to dominate the political agenda”. He
said, however, that “the problem of bureaucracy must be set against the
continuing pattern of rank and file activity”. The latter, when freed to act by
a growing gap between the officials and ranks of the labour movement, had
started to create an alternative industrial and political leadership.[6]

A more detailed
account by Raymond Markey argues “the nature of the ALP was largely determined in New South Wales in
the 1890s”. There the “party first brought the working class to the full range
of policies”—state arbitration, White Australia, the old-age pension and
assistance to smallholders—“which were offered in exchange for support of
[tariff] protection in the early Commonwealth”. This program “was the product
of the ideology of labourism”, which dominated the party under its initially
conflicting, but then jointly consolidated, leadership of urban professional
politicians with utopian socialist backgrounds and the Australian Workers’
Union (AWU). This leadership was
driven by electoral considerations and had risen to express, through racism and
populist agrarianism, the petty-bourgeois influence of farmers and workers
hoping to end their proletarian status.

Markey said the
united utopian socialists and AWU
took control of the party away from the labour council, which was weakening by
1892. Later they defeated a challenge from union militants and “left”
socialists, whose base among urban workers and coalminers was “decimated” in
the 1890s. They also “dismantled the party’s early social democratic policy and
restrained the more specifically working-class radicalism which had briefly
flowered in the late 1880s and early 1890s”. Before then, “the party envisaged
by the urban unions when they established [it] in 1891 was to be a class-based
organisation, pursuing class political strategies in parliament, in much the
same way as the early German Social Democratic party”. The Australian party’s
earlier “platform was typically social democratic, in the sense that it
concentrated on two major areas: political reform and industrial legislation”.[7]

The
significance Markey ascribed to developments in NSW
and to the role of the AWU is
peculiar. The colony’s economy and labour movement, relative to those of Victoria, in
particular, were not predominant until at least the 1890s. In the latter
colony, the ALP began to
accommodate rural interests without the influence of the AWU. Most significantly, conditional support for protection had
emerged in Victoria. This policy, as he said, expressed an “alliance of liberal
protectionist manufacturers and workers”. It bound together the elements of the
liberal labour movement program, wherever they had had their source.[8]

The substantial
problem of Markey’s account, however, is his characterisation of the ALP as, at first, analogous to early
social democracy. Indeed, he then proceeded to claim only that the “moderate
parliamentary strategy which characterised the NSW
Labor party at an early stage also eventually
characterised European social democracy”.[9]
Contemporaneously, the analogy breaks down. Social democracy in Germany,
for example, was characterised by a spirit of opposition. Its unions were subject
to assertions of the party’s authority and differentiated from other unions by
aggressiveness. The illegal distribution of the party’s central newspaper
between 1878 and 1890 inspired the party’s sense of heroism. It occasionally
introduced or supported legislation for reforms, but its parliamentary posture
was expressed by the slogan “for this system, not one man and not one penny”
and confirmed in the 1880s by votes against Bismarck’s social
insurance proposals and a protectionist steamship subsidy.[10]

In Australia,
the part of the labour movement motivated by the same spirit was only tenuously
associated with the ALP.
Socialism, variously understood as humanitarianism, cooperativism or the
advocacy of state ownership of some or all of the means of production (when
extension of the state’s role as a means for achieving socialism was not yet
tested), mobilised forces to found the ALP,
was pervasive in its early years and expressed in some planks of the party’s
platform. However:

·A positive attitude to and up-front
activity in support of major strikes distinguished the socialists in the
Australian Socialist League from other sections of the labour movement. The ASL
understood these strikes to be indicators of workers’ increased militancy and
class awareness, from which opportunities might emerge to propagate the need to
reorganise property relations and a mass movement for socialism.

·From at least 1892, this
approach to workers’ militancy originated more specifically in the socialist
left in the ASL and, also, the Active Service Brigade and the Social Democratic
Federation, whose memberships overlapped with the ASL’s left. The initial base
of the socialist left was the upsurge of the traditionally independent
agitation of the unemployed, who were predominantly poorly unionised unskilled
workers: the ALP failed to address
their concerns. Later in the decade, these socialists, based on support from
workers in the northern coalfields and Sydney, were
involved in a four-year-long effort to push the ALP
to a more rigorous socialist position, but the premise of this was the creation
of an independent socialist party.

·Reading was “integral to the oppositional culture of the 1890s”. Radicals—socialists,
anarchists and single taxers—played a part disproportionate to their numbers in
the labour movement’s journals and bookshops. On the other hand, the socialist
James Moroney criticised the ALP
for “doing no educational work”.[11]

The ALP was instead oriented to electoral
and parliamentary activity (Moroney wrote, a quarter-century before Childe,
that it had “degenerated into a vote-catching machine”). There it offered
governmental support in exchange for concessions. The colonies’ different
capitalist polities then conditioned variations in the development of the
party. In Victoria, the liberals’ protectionism allowed the party to remain their
relatively loosely organised permanent ally for more than a decade. In NSW, however, the liberal faction
offered only more limited reforms and the conservative faction’s protectionism attracted
a number of erstwhile ALP
parliamentarians. The party enforced its pursuit of an alliance with the
liberals by developing a combination of candidates’ pledges and parliamentary
caucusing. When the liberals’ reform efforts stagnated at the end of the 1890s,
the party switched its support to the protectionists, who supported measures
such as the introduction of compulsory arbitration and direct employment on
public works.

The labour
councils directed the ALP’s
orientation so long as they were able. The intervention of the NSW labour council in the 1892 Broken
Hill miners’ strike, was, Markey said, its “last major political activity of
the decade”.[12] It urged
the party to “use every endeavour to oust the present government”. This approach
meant support for the liberal parliamentarians’ censure motion even after they
had rejected the party’s proposal to include in the motion condemnation of the
government’s suppression of the strike. The substantial agitation among workers
in support of the Broken Hill strike—the activity of the miners, public
meetings throughout the colony organised by the ALP,
a large demonstration by Sydney unions, during which, according to Markey, some
called for a general strike, and the ASL campaign culminating in a
20,000-strong march in Sydney—also gainsays what Bramble and Markey suggested
about a decline in working-class mobilisation preceding the dominance of
reformism.[13]

A more
searching examination of the character of the working-class mobilisation that
peaked at the start of the 1890s is needed to establish the source of the
problematic character of the “independence” of the ALP. In Australia,
a cycle of labour movement mobilisation developed from the late 1870s because
workers’ expectations of continuing increases in living standards were
increasingly not matched by their experience of standards that were relatively
stagnant. In past assessments of this mobilisation, the conditions of the lower
strata of the working class have been presented as relatively close to those of
better off workers. However, the irregularity of employment of most of the
lower strata restricted not only their income, but their industrial and
political organisation. Also, the extension of Australian unionism beyond craft
workers, for example, has been discussed with regard to its parallels with the
English new unionism.

The political
development of Australian workers, however, did not align itself with a
division between craft and non-craft workers, differences in the social
background of employees or the incidence of piecework. Instead, substantial
sections of workers who had acknowledged (therefore, male) skills acquired
through apprenticeship or experience, or who held strategic positions in the
production of exports, in domestic transport and, later, in certain services,
were relatively privileged. In addition to the relatively broad formal
democratic rights already held, they gained further concessions in the
conditions under which they entered the class struggle. These were either
sustained from a period of capitalist structural expansion through the
transition to stagnation, or readily restored in subsequent expansion,
constituting these workers as a labour aristocratic stratum.[14]

“The Chinese
issue”, Markey noted elsewhere, was “extremely important to the labour movement
organisationally”.[15]
The first major strike by the mass unions was in 1878, at a climax of the
seamen’s campaign against the introduction of Chinese crews in coastal
shipping. In the next decade, sustained action against Chinese labour was taken
by unionised white workers, including seamen and wharf labourers, shearers,
metal miners and the trades and labour councils, which in this regard were led
by furniture workers. The labour movement sought and won from capital
restrictions on Chinese labour in the work force. Then, for most of the
twentieth century, it largely supported the White Australia policy. It did not
seek common life conditions for Asian and Melanesian workers, nor enjoy the
solidarity the latter workers offered through their organisation and industrial
action.

In labour
historiography, this stark choice remains often glossed over. For example,
Buckley and Wheelwright suggested the seamen, at least, were influenced only by
the “unrealistic” nature of a claim for equal pay and conditions. Yet the
seamen did not even say such equality was desirable. Nor was it unrealistic: in
the 1880s, Chinese furniture workers organised and won a fifty-hour week and
pay rates similar to those of white furniture workers.[16]

Verity Burgmann
claimed that a social consensus for the exclusion of the Chinese, and for White
Australia, sprang from the capitalist class’s ruling ideology of racism. Labour
movement resistance to that was precluded by its lack of class consciousness,
she said. Yet cross-class opposition to White Australia existed—indeed, some
conceived an alternative nation-building project that rejected it—with which
the labour movement overall did not ally. It was, instead, more active in the
policy’s promotion than Burgmann suggested. Moreover, it pursued specific
concerns such as the exclusion of resident “coloured” populations from
unionised employment and directly participated in the regulation of contract
labour migration to the point of its exclusion, rather than simply the
prevention of its use for strike-breaking.[17]

White
Australia’s racist restriction of the work force was not a simple collaboration
of white workers with their bosses. The labour aristocracy and its concerns
dominated the labour movement, which, as Stuart Macintyre put it, “reflected
the sectional interests of the organised white adult men who comprised it”.[18]
The labour aristocracy made up the main part of union membership, which was
less than ten percent of the workers for all but a few years from the middle of
the 1880s and peaked in 1891 at a little more than twenty percent of workers in
both NSW and Victoria, and four
percent in South Australia. Their principal organisational instrument was the eight-hour-day
movement, which Connell and Irving argued was, from the 1870s, leading towards
a class mobilisation. But only a small proportion of workers gained “the boon”,
even though it was sometimes won quite easily.[19]

Workers who
were longer organised included: the more exclusive building, metals and
printing trades; the “relatively well-paid” Victorian gold miners; the coastal
seamen, who “were comparatively better off in some respects” than the deepwater
sailors; and Melbourne’s Hobson’s Bay stevedores, who were skilled in wool and wheat
stowage for long voyages. When pastoral workers unionised, shearing, to which
access was restricted to more experienced workers and for which pay rates were
far superior to other rural work, was the main occupation involved. Other
workers, less well-paid and working longer hours, such as the Melbourne tram
workers and NSW railway navvies,
may have struck, but they couldn’t organise. Urban unskilled and semi-skilled
workers in Queensland never effectively organised. The labour councils and the
Amalgamated Shearers’ Union were usually involved in what unionisation did occur among the
lower strata of the working class: important examples of this intercession
include the Trades Hall Council role in the organisation of women tailors in Melbourne in
1882-83 and the ASU’s part in the development of the shedhands’ unions. The
unionised NSW coalminers—whose
1873 settlement, which included conferencing with the colliery owners and
arbitration, was cited by Jurgen Kuczynski as marking the separating out of a
labour aristocratic circle, but who subsequently suffered poorer agreements in
1881 and 1886, major strike defeats in 1886 and 1888, a loss of faith in
arbitration, and more generally from poor pay, working conditions and
employment security—were an exception that proved these rules. The Broken Hill miners
also organised, despite high labour turnover.[20]

The course of
the defeated 1890 maritime strike and its aftermath demonstrated the
significance of the labour aristocracy in the labour movement. The union
leadership strategy restricted the conflict in size, but extended it in length,
which “worked in favour of employers” by failing to build on the stronger
public support in the strike’s early stages to bring the employer cabal to the
negotiating table. It may also have contributed to the minimal industrial
mobilisation of the previously unorganised—so the strike did not have the
character of a mass strike—and the capacity of the employers to find
strikebreakers among the unemployed. Parliamentarians commented that the mass
support of manual workers for the 1890 maritime strike came “especially from
among those of the better class”, while strikebreaking workers were found among
the “lowest strata”. Nevertheless, the secretary of the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers made an assessment that only the unskilled workers had been beaten.
Certainly this was true for their organisation: for example, in Sydney, unionised
labourers were largely driven from the docks, yet union membership in the NSW work force, and also labour council
affiliations, continued to grow for another year.[21]

In the same
year, the strike’s supporters formed Labor parties. This move was long prepared
by labour movement discussion of the need for class representation within the
parliamentary system, and the experiences of various labour councils in
developing electoral platforms and sponsoring candidates. The formation of
Labor parties mobilised union sympathisers in city and country, renewing the
labour aristocracy’s influence in the lower strata through inspired socialists
and single taxers. With the onset of economic depression in 1892, agitation
about unemployment became the main form of working-class radicalisation.
However, the ALP and labour
councils both opposed all bar sedate campaigning. The social crisis was not
used to raise the working class towards political leadership of the masses against
capital. Instead, the ALP
concentrated on political reform, industrial legislation and, increasingly,
resolution of the “land question”, which alliedthat section of the proletariat best positioned to use these concessions
– that is,the labour aristocracy—with
the bourgeoisie, at the cost of the interests of the whole class. This
overturns the significance labour historiography has given to the shift of
working-class political support from liberal “friends of labour” to the ALP. The struggles in the ALP during its initial development
expressed the context of its formation, but the ebb of the working-class
radicalisation in the ALP’s first years laid the basis for it to be a new way
for opportunism to dominate in politics in the working class.[22]

The ‘Australian Settlement’

In the first
years of the Australian federation, the existing elements of the liberal labour
program—White Australia, protection, arbitration, state economic interventions
and welfare activity and regional militarism—became part of the national
polity. This was a class settlement in which the labour aristocracy’s
leadership of the working class was exerted. McQueen has questioned the
existence of an “Australian Settlement” other than as ideological deployment in
the contemporary class struggle of the view that a class settlement was
reached: he argued that the quid pro quo
of frugal comfort offered to workers in support of guaranteeing local sales for
manufacturers did not eventuate. Markey instead denied the settlement’s
endurance, pointing to the reappearance even before World War I of significant
strike activity and the challenge of a new militant syndicalism to the ALP’s leadership in the labour movement.
Nonetheless, by the 1920s the moral economy of the 1880s had been restored.
Liberal politicians and others with influence in state bodies developed, in
contrast to employers’ demands for “freedom of contract” in the 1890s, a system
of concessions in the conditions of the class struggle by capital to the
working class. The concessions were supported by sectors of capital favoured by
the liberals’ policies and were in response to newly emergent and re-emergent
working-class mobilisation, which eventually involved industrial militancy and
even political radicalisation among workers.[23]

Andrew Wells
has given an apt, if incomplete, description of the moral economy which formed
in early twentieth century Australia: “the organised working class had a real
stake in the preservation of the given economic and social relations … a small
island of relative wage justice”, which, however, was built on racism that
included the subjection of indigenous Australians to state “protection” and its
corrupt control of work payments they might receive, and, in its social
reproduction, on gender inequality.[24]
The oppression of women, who are the majority of the working class, extended
into paid work, even among those women who were organised. Social norms
achieved much in creating gender segregation in the work force. Women were also
excluded from many occupations either altogether or, if married, by
discriminatory employment regulations and practices. One of these, which
sometimes gained union support, was to grant equal pay when employers were
expected to favour employing males. However, if women were doing the same work
as men, they were usually paid only apercentage
of the males’ rate, supposedly because they did not support dependants.
Furthermore, comparable worth assessments of occupations whose ranks were
largely filled by women were reduced through a gendered conception of “skill”
as well.[25]

Also, among
white male workers, a stratum was relatively privileged. The gradation of
benefits within the working class continued, if in an altered form. Central to this
gradation was the establishment and development of the arbitration system.

Arbitration
progressively applied a “living wage” determination of pay and conditions. From
1907, federal court judgments under its liberal president, Henry Bourne
Higgins, launched the award structure of a basic wage and margins for skill
that prevailed for sixty years, affirmed social necessity as the basis of
determining wage rates and asserted the priority of that norm against company
profitability. Awards generally set a standard eight-hour working day. They
also provided that for it male labourers should get the basic wage. This was
purported to be a “fair and reasonable remuneration”, sufficient, through a
working week, to support him, with a spouse and three children, “as a human
being living in a civilised community” in “a condition of frugal comfort”.

The
significance of the basic wage was reduced because: it was set low, at seven
shillings, in order to seek employers’ acceptance; the intermittent employment
of many labourers was addressed at all only through loadings; the
categorisation of jobs as “sub-labouring” and the market orientation of the
state arbitration courts and wages boards that determined most workers’ wages,
which led to lower pay rates than the basic wage for many workers, were finally
eliminated only after World War I;and
cost of living adjustments to the basic wage were irregular before 1921.
Nonetheless, the awards met the hours demand upon which unions had traditionally
organised and raised most labourers’ wages by between ten and forty percent. Thus,
awards reached the living standard which was usually understood to have applied
before the 1890s depression and which unions had thereafter sought. If, as has
been suggested, the living wage was a “socially useful myth”, then the myth was
sustained because its replacement of capital’s “capacity to pay” in the
determination of workers’ pay and conditions had some substance.

Awards also
included a “rate for the job”, an amount payable for the supposed marginal
comparable worth of various types of work. In comparable worth assessments,
work considered, for example, heavy, more dangerous, dirty or varied as
“skilled” was differentiated from that thought of as light, less dangerous,
clean or repetitious. Managerial and supervisory roles, responsibility for
machines or money and strength in physical effort were valued more than
coordination and cooperation, caring and responsibility for people and accuracy
and concentration in mental effort.

Tradesmen were
among those paid margins. Typical earnings of newspaper compositors in 1926
were about three times as much as those of labourers (this difference was half
what it had been in 1904). A fitter and turner’s margin was at first worth
forty-three percent of the basic wage. However, the awards also conformed to
the practice of differential pay rates within trades: more specialised work
received lower margins.

The skills and
capacities for work of certain other occupations were also recognised. For
example, shearing work was awarded a considerable margin in 1911 because,
Higgins said, “it is not everyone who can become a shearer … [the work]
requires close attention, and involves considerable strain”. The established
hierarchies of the railways, which included higher pay for salaried officers,
which had been granted by management partly in order to differentiate them from
wage workers, were preserved in the officers’ awards, although the income
advantage was threatened during the 1930s Depression by legislated pay cuts.

The real value
of margins changed with movements in the cost of living. For those who remained
employed in positions that paid margins, deflation, such as occurred in the Depression,
was advantageous. In inflationary periods, the labour market situation often
allowed those getting margins to pursue over-award payments. Otherwise, such
payments were rare in the first half of the twentieth century. Some casual
labourers who were not getting award compensation for their intermittent
employment struck and won this directly from their employers. Experienced
labourers who retained their strength—typically those in their thirties and
forties—might be able to get a little extra for their acquired skills. In those
instances, however, when collective agreements covered employment conditions
overall, such as in the Broken Hill mines from 1925, or at the monopoly tobacco
producer, arbitration’s standards stood as a benchmark or threat to be beaten
by higher pay and other benefits: for example, a 1943 Broken Hill agreement
exchanged a no “go-slow” undertaking and withdrawal of union support for shop
committees for changes to the “lead bonus” payment, and under this the miners’
average earnings doubled to reach four times the basic wage by 1949.

Different pay
rates alone do not necessarily show that better paid workers were relatively
privileged. The different incomes needed for the commodities that sustain the
physiological and cultural conditions for the capacities of various workers—that
is, the reproduction of distinct types of labour-power—must also be accounted
for. Only thereafter can analysis determine that the labour aristocracy had
also gained from capital the concession of a historical incorporation of
further goods into the body of commodities required for the reproduction of
their labour-power—that is, an increase in the value of their labour-power
relative to the mass of workers, rather than wage increases related to the
conditions of the labour market. Through this concession, labour aristocrats
would not only be able to engage in additional consumption or otherwise provide
for illness and injury, unemployment and industrial disputation, but also more
readily acquire housing stock and highly durable household and personal items.

Differences
related to the creation of different work capacities with regard to items which
are consumed within a workers’ lifetime do not appear to be sufficient to
account for the wage relativities established under arbitration. The physical
demands that labouring work imposed were not less than those of trades work. In
this regard, therefore, the latter did not of itself demand higher pay,
although the low level of the basic wage rate may have meant that a more
liberal satisfaction of physiological needs could have been incorporated into
margins. Union submissions about the basic wage rate suggested that a rate
about ten percent higher was needed to sustain the typical worker (as a male
“breadwinner”). Techniques used in trades and other occupations may have
required higher functional literacy, more knowledge of current affairs or
technological developments, further professional or scientific studies and so
on, when compared with labouring work. This might partly explain the higher pay
of compositors or administrative staff, for example. However, the calculation
of the basic wage also already allowed for the purchase of some cultural items.
The cost of raising dependent children needs to be considered, too. For
example, young labourers were better paid than apprentices, at least before
World War I. The apprentice’s family, generally a tradesman’s, were expected to
continue to support him even while he was working. Yet an apprentice’s pay by
this time at least sometimes covered his day-to-day living expenses, leaving
only the extra costs to be paid from adult earnings.

The admittedly
scanty evidence of the greater wealth of the labour aristocracy also suggests
an expanded margin for “skill” was the new form taken by these workers’ earlier
claim to “respectability”. Evidence on housing presented to the 1913 NSW basic
wage case showed home ownership among Sydney workers was
largely confined to better paid workers. A study of the probate records of
males in SA between 1905 and 1915 found the average net probated wealth at
death of skilled workers to be almost double that of other manual workers. This
probably understated the difference in wealth between the labour aristocratic
stratum as a whole and the mass of workers.The analytical categories are mismatched. Also, those not probated
tended to have little or no wealth and come from the lower strata of the
working class, so that if all households’ wealth had been measured, this
strata’s average wealth would have been the one most radically reduced among
all sections of the population.[26]

Arbitration
also offered a foothold for unionisation. In the 1890s, employers had rejected
the craft unions’ declarations of “fair” wages and the eight-hour day and union
attempts to force them into “voluntary” arbitration. Compulsory—that is, state
administered—arbitration gave unions a new form of union recognition through
their ability to make claims against employers, to investigate possible
breaches of awards and, sometimes, to get forms of preference in employment for
unionists. Companies that wanted to minimise the effects of this state
regulation, including union recognition—in order to increase piecework, for
example—were still threatened by arbitration and often paid higher than average
wages and provided other benefits to workers to avoid it. State administration
of arbitration helped some workers organise in, for example, building services
(such as caretakers, cleaners and watchmen) and goods transport. In NSW, shop assistants registered a union
in 1902 and organised five percent of their potential membership before winning
an award in 1907. Thereafter, the union principally organised male workers: the
proportion of the union’s members who were women fell from one-third,
corresponding to the ratio of their employment, to just nineteen percent in
1918, although the proportion of shop assistants who were women was increasing.
The arbitration system also provided some institutional support to the some
smaller unions. These, however, were generally those oriented to craft
exclusivity, or to organising salaried staff explicitly in opposition to
all-grades unions in industries such as postage, local government and public
transport. Many smaller primary industry unions amalgamated with the AWU because of difficulties in operating
in the system.

The dramatic
growth of unions during the first two decades of the twentieth century and the
relatively high overall union density among Australian workers from the second
decade of the twentieth century through to the 1980s can not be explained
principally by the advantages offered to weakly organised and smaller unions as
the arbitration system developed, however. The better organised and larger
unions must primarily account for this phenomenon. Furthermore, subsequent
changes in union density, except for its fluctuations in the 1920s, can’t be
related to changes in the arbitration system either. This is true both for
periods of union growth, which also occurred between 1935 and 1953 and in the
1970s, or of decline, such as during the Depression and in the 1950s and 1960s.

Arbitration’s
state administration protected employers, too, because it left hiring and
firing and workplace organisation subject to managerial prerogative, and
restricted industrial action. Thus, both the conditions for workers’ collective
action and the desire for such action in opposition to arbitration, when it
might secure a favourable change in the balance of forces between workers and
employers, continued to exist. Many unions were strategically oriented to
observing arbitration law and using the powers it granted to them. Others,
however, employed varying strategies of membership mobilisation. For them,
arbitration often provided recognition of their membership coverage, but it
played a secondary part, if any, in their overall organising to restored craft forms
of regulation or collective bargaining. The latter were not limited to skilled
or militant workers: for example, collective agreements governed the employment
conditions of workers of the monopoly tobacco producer for several decades; and
many salaried unionists sometimes negotiated directly with their employers.

Politics in the
working class, including the relationship of the class’s strata to the
capitalist class, conditioned the pattern of unionisation. A higher rate of
unionisation among a group of workers expressed, in some combination, the
results of workers’ militancy and the concession in practice of the right to
organise, which was concentrated on the labour aristocracy. Those who were
highly unionised included not only craftsmen and coalminers, but teachers,
whose union enrolled, with their employers’ encouragement, sixty percent of
their number, especially those who were older, male and career-oriented, in NSW in 1929, meatworkers, wharf
labourers and others. Moreover, a union could encompass all the various
influences on unionisation. The AWU,
Australia’s largest union in this period, with an organisational monopoly
over most primary production, itself organised shearers and shedhands between
1904 and 1908 through industrial activity and securing an award. It achieved
much of its subsequent growth by amalgamations, which often brought in workers
who had first organised on a more militant basis than the subsequent
orientation of the AWU to
arbitration and the election of ALP
governments, but it also grew by seeking new awards for which it could be a
respondent and therefore gain coverage.[27]

Finally, while
the living wage’s reinforcement of the family structure as a patriarch and his
dependantstended to reduce
competition for “male” jobs generally, arbitration boosted the relative
employment security of craftsmen. Its decisions increasingly supported the
revival of apprenticeship, in partial contradiction to its general defence of
managerial prerogative. Full craft training had been, at the end of the
nineteenth century, largely on the verge of breakdown because of productive
reorganisation and the relatively fast growth of urban light manufacturing
industries. Thereafter, however, the labour supply situation compelled many employers
towards agreements with the craft unions on compulsory apprenticeships. Awards
then extended the apprenticeship requirements to more trades, added some
controls on apprentice numbers and also improved apprentice pay rates.
Legislation in 1945 further reinforced apprenticeship through the regulation of
trades work. Unemployment among craftsmen was generally substantially less than
among the mass of workers. When unemployment was widespread in both groups, in
the 1930s, its height was still a little less severe and, more significantly,
it was less persistent for workers such as engineers in the metals industries.

Among
professional and commercial employees, employment security was gained partly by
a similar phenomenon. Professional qualifications became necessary for some clerical
positions, excluding from competition for these jobs both women and those men
who couldn’t gain the credentials. Other working conditions helped protect the
jobs of some white-collar workers, such as concepts of career employment, and
the tenure of many employed in the public sector. In NSW during the Depression, among teachers, only women were
targeted for dismissal, while forced early retirement was used among railway
officers. Nor were there substantial retrenchments in the Queensland public
service at that time. The trade-offs for such job retention were nominal pay
cuts of twenty to thirty percent.

Certain other
groups of workers achieved elements of employment security. Some labourers
gained relatively permanent employment in the railways or with large private
companies.The tobacco monopoly offered
no job cuts due to “slackness of trade” and honoured this even during the Depression.
The establishment in Broken Hill in 1931 of residential employment preference,
through union membership rules, for work in its mines, as well as job
rationing, and the exclusion of married women from “town” jobs, was a unique
example of local labour market closure.

Seamen, on the
other hand, are an example of workers who lost employment security. By 1901,
they were again well organised and had secured a collective agreement which
restored their 1889 pay levels. Even in 1908, Higgins refused to use their pay
rate for comparisons in setting awards. However, under White Australia they no
longer had any special advantage in employment: their union’s chief interest
became a Navigation Act that would protect coastal shipping. In 1910, they were
forced by a lack of progress in
collective bargaining to enter the arbitration system. In 1919, they rode the postwar
strike wave to its peak in a six-month strike in which they won major gains in
pay and conditions, a special tribunal and cabotage. Yet they were soon back
under arbitration and their strategic position was subsequently undermined by
the introduction of oil-fuelled ships and more competitive and extensive land
transport. Membership of the Seamen’s Union fell by more than half in the decade from 1923 before beginning to
recover.[28]

The labour aristocracy and opportunism in Australia

Thus, by the
1920s, the bulk of adult white male workers experienced at least some
concessions in—and the class’s upper stratum a relative advantage in—the
conditions with which they entered the class struggle. The “settlement” apparatus of arbitration and certain other
employment conditions, a reinforced White Australia, and the higher tariffs and
other aspects of the policy of “protection all round” had by then been
established. This experience was a fundamental determinant of the character of
politics in the working class.

Yet many—and
not just the labour bureaucracy, who are among the system’s practitioners, and
its boosters, but also those who have focussed on that caste’s denouement as
the key to working-class radicalisation—have been interested chiefly in the
administrative form, rather than the material content, of the arbitration
system.[29]
Similarly, Peter Scherer made an erroneous claim that the arbitration tribunals
and system of union regulation were “the executive committee of … [at least]
that part of the labour movement in secure jobs which Marx dubbed the ‘labour
aristocracy’” because, he argued, unions were powerful state agents which the
tribunals encouraged “to protect workers from a greedy public”.[30]
The unions, however, were not state agencies but workers’ organisations.
Arbitration was the main form in which concessions in the class struggle
created an upper stratum of the working class.

John Wanna was
closer to the mark in his argument that arbitration was the state’s “main
weapon and form of enticement to ensnare organised labour”. He followed Brian
Fitzpatrick in understanding that the arbitration system represented a
temporary compromise in class conflict, which increased the unions’ numbers and
organisational strength, albeit hierarchically, but circumscribed their militancy.[31]
However, this argument did not sufficiently emphasise that while the form
constituted by arbitration of labour aristocratic concessions to the working
class and class collaboration might be temporary, that same content could
continue through a series of forms. Wells described the situation
fundamentally: cheap land and transportation, “advanced conditions of
production and high world commodity prices” brought rural exporters returns
high enough to permit a “sophisticated ‘political settlement’ between capital
and labour that redistributed profits and wealth earned by rural export
industries to urban manufacturing industries, and from capital to labour and,
within labour, directed these gains from the skilled to the unskilled and
semi-skilled male worker”.[32]

Wells’ claim
about the redistribution among workers must be qualified, however. Differences
in pay between skilled workers and the rest of the working class did become
less than they had been during the nineteenth century. Arbitration levelled up
labourers’ wages, unlike the pay rates of craft workers. Yet workers’ need to
have served apprenticeships to do skilled work restricted competition for such
positions, which meant craft workers had more regular employment than most
labourers. Craft training may also have applied some pressure upward on tradesmen’s
lower pay rates because these workers could seek the better-paid craftpositions. Moreover, the real value of
the basic wage was not increased until after the second world war. Meanwhile,
labourers could make real gains on the basic wage only by getting a “margin for
skill” awarded. Also, the main challenges in the 1920s and 1930s to the
standards previously established through arbitration—the reversion from a
forty-four-hour week to a forty-eight-hour week in timber yards, pay cuts for
waterside workers and coalminers and the 1931 cut in the basic wage, which was
restored only between 1934 and 1937 with the proviso of a “prosperity loading”—exerted
their direct influence primarily upon the less well-off workers.[33]

Thus, only a
narrow stratum in the working class gained further concessions in the class
struggle beyond those gained by most white male workers. The differentiation of
this upper stratum of the working class was institutionally reinforced, too. Even
a common wage form—piecework—across this stratification had distinct social
consequences for the upper stratum and the mass of the working class. For
example, coalminers aimed to secure a living wage but otherwise limit
production. Skilled workers such as compositors and moulders, however, sought
incomes akin to artisans, and shearers’ piecework distinguished them from other
sections of the rural proletariat.[34]

The gradation
of benefits in the first decades of the twentieth century reversed a tendency at
the end of the nineteenth century towards a fragmentation of the upper stratum
of the working class which Markey has identified. In that stratum, two layers
now had certain common experiences in their relations with the capitalist class
and the state. These were the “traditional” labour aristocracy of craft
unionists, which used its skill, wage margins and job control to sustain strong
union organisation and a consciousness as workers of superiority to mere
labourers, and “a new aristocracy of labour of sorts … being created in the
expanding professional and commercial areas of employment, amongst teachers,
bank and insurance clerks, and other office workers”, which relied on status,
employment security and career structures for its position and which was more
weakly organised and possessed of a “middle class” consciousness.[35]
Among those common experiences, continuity of employment— that is, the form of
the capitalist relations of production in the sphere of relations between
workers and employers—stands in first place. To the extent that the stratum’s
white-collar members especially relied on this for their relatively privileged
position, their membership of the stratum is confirmed. The unity of these
sections of workers as a stratum with regard to its social basis in better
concessions in the conditions of the class struggle, in contrast to the mass of
the working class, renewed the labour aristocratic stratification of the
working class. The chief features of that stratification persisted until the
1940s and even, substantially, into the 1980s.[36]

The
characteristics of the labour aristocratic stratification ensured that the
upper stratum, and thus its particular interests, was much more significant
than its numbers alone would suggest in the politics in the working class.
Moreover, the stratum could lead a broader section among the mass of workers
based on concessions from which they commonly benefited. This was
institutionalised in a number of ways. Within cross-strata unions and in the
union movement overall, the organisations of the labour aristocracy generally
had better representation and resources. Other social organisations of the
working class, such as friendly societies, also tended to be dominated by those
workers who comprised the labour aristocracy. Finally, the ALP was part of the
same “tradition” in the labour movement: it appealed to workers to be a
political constituency for its opportunist program of reconciliation of their
interests, through a modified capitalist order, with those of the nation.[37]

Much of the
workplace was probably like these examples of circumstances in the clothing
trades, boot trades and vehicle building. The ten per cent of the clothing
workers who were male were able, together with employers and the arbitration
system, to preserve their skill margins, while women’s margins were minimal and
workers’ united resistance was lost, in the years before World War II. The
footwear industry was regulated by awards and negotiations between the
employers’ organisation and the union. This regulation “delivered industrial
peace shaped by craft beliefs in alliances with the ‘fair employer’ based on
tariff protection”: for example, in a 1946 award, lost time loadings were
conceded for weekly hiring and in 1947 only men gained increases in margins
despite a shortage of women workers. After World War II, most of the leadership
of the vehicle builders’ union relied on an implicit exchange of industrial
peace for a closed shop, and on arbitration rather than direct action to gain
any improvements with regard to the poor work environment, employment
conditions and payment systems. Meanwhile immigrant southern European workers
increasingly dominated employment in the worst jobs.[38]

Wage militancy,
however, was also primarily about gaining and maintaining margins (or,
alternatively, over-award payments). Other union activity was usually concerned
with hours of work, the defence or improvement of various workplace conditions
and organising rights, or establishing that certain workers would do a particular
job. The unions’ activities were significant in the development of the workers’
class struggle. If the aims of union actions were conditions from which the
rest of the working class was not excluded, these became a standard to be
defended by the class against capital’s encroachment. Moreover, the actions
required some degree of industrial organisation. If they most often were token
stoppages, to establish that disputes existed and then to resort to
arbitration, the trials of strength for wage increases and other claims that
occurred, or the frequency of and number of workers participating in strikes,
did give rise to strike waves.[39]

The possibility
of substantial advances in workers’ political consciousness and organisation
towards their class rule is related to the transformation of a strike wave into
a mass strike, however. The mass strike, which Rosa Luxemburg said was “the
method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the
proletarian struggle in the revolution”, is dependent upon the breadth of
industrial action, in particular beyond the already organised workers, and its
politicisation.[40] Such
circumstances fundamentally test the nature of politics in the working class.

Thus, while the
century-long history of the ALP allows much discussion about whether or not it
has served the interests of the working class—with regard to the prevailing
socio-political conditions and as an instrument to change those conditions—special
attention must be given to the period at the end of and after World War II,
when “a matchless opportunity for working class advance”[41]
developed. In that period, a strike wave for the first time extended throughout
most of the country and involved many workers who were relatively unorganised
and those suffering from racial and gender oppression. (Previously, strike
waves principally involved more prolonged disputes of smaller groups of workers.
Only a minority of unionists, and few other workers, took part in the 1917 NSW
general strike. The 1912 Brisbane general strike was, relatively, broader, since its aim was
solidarity with the tramways workers who were trying to organise, and
three-quarters of the state’s unionists came out.) It also connected industrial
and political activity partly through the demands of some workers’ actions and
other agitation, but especially on the question of party organisation within
the working class. A political radicalisation among workers, who had
experienced Depression and war, was expressed through forms such as militant
union leaderships, intellectual radicalism, the Communist Party’s membership,
votes and newspaper readership and also the influence of independent Labor and
Trotskyist groups, all of which peaked in strength.

The ALP, which
was the chief political proponent of the liberal labour program of labour
market regulation, pursued this program with greater determination in the
1940s, however, despite the exposure of its limitations in the Depression. Its
governments resisted the workers’ drive for improvements in wages, hours and
other working conditions, delaying these as long as they could. Between 1945
and 1947 the party, in a historically unique attempt to establish avowed
control of the unions, initiated Industrial Groups in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia
and Victoria. Meanwhile in Western
Australia, an attempt by
fifteen unions to form a labour council independent of party structures was
successfully resisted.

If the
political radicalisation was in decline from 1947, partly because the
experience of an extending period from the end of the war of relative economic
stability and low unemployment increasingly contradicted concerns about the
return of economic depression for most workers, it was not yet defeated: that
was the role of opportunism. Groups of workers such as the Broken Hill miners,
who once had been a leading militant and radical section of the class but now
were long prepared by the concessions to them for a different role, did not
contribute to the working class upsurge. The ALP’s industrial intervention became
increasingly significant. In the 1949 coal strike, according to Tom Sheridan,
decisions of ALP-led unions to move stockpiled coal and to threaten to work
open-cut mines were the key to the majority of rank-and-file coalminers losing
confidence that they could win. More broadly, the mobilisation of the ALP
Industrial Groups routed relatively successful Communist interventions in the
Australian Council of Trade Unions and some unions and regional labour movement
organisations. Grouper successes led to sharp reductions in participation by
workers in union bodies and, from 1949, the loss of official support for many
shop committees.[42]

The balance of
workers’ political and industrial strengths and weaknesses, in relation to the
resistance of capital, in the conflicts of the 1940s resulted in a
reinforcement of the “wage-earners’ welfare state” and a relative stabilisation
of the labour aristocratic stratification. At the start of the long postwar
capitalist boom, the real value of the basic wage and the percentage of the
male wage rates paid to women were increased, but the old margins were
restored. Governments adopted policies of state fiscal action to maintain full
employment overall and more comprehensive welfare measures. In the early 1950s,
penal powers in arbitration, which had been abandoned in 1930, were
reintroduced. Cost of living adjustments of the basic wage also stopped. In
1967, at the initiative of the employers, the award structure was changed to a
“total wage”.

Yet the
standards established under the “living wage” were not consistently attacked.
Generally, the 1950s and 1960s were years of low price inflation and some wage
increases. In 1969 a union campaign defeated the penal powers. Thereafter,
through the 1970s, workers generally won real wage rises. While the arbitrated
wage indexation, which ran from 1975 to 1981, and the 1982 wage freeze cut real
wages, unions increasingly relied on collective agreements to provide for
over-award payments or to submit to arbitration for acceptance as consent
awards. Moreover, arbitration decisions and legislation eventually responded to
campaigns for equal pay rates for indigenous and women workers, but this left
in place these workers’ marginalisation from or job segregation within the work
force.[43]

The character
of the occupational composition of the labour aristocracy changed between the
beginning of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s. Skilled workers in the
work force grew from twenty-four per cent in 1966 to thirty per cent in 1976,
but had become less important in the upper stratum. Partly they were directly
replaced, such as in Victorian electricity production, in which the employer
favoured technicians and dredge operators against maintenance and other workers
(and the former stood somewhat aloof from the latter’s major strike in 1977).
The strategic position in the class struggle of printers was threatened and
that of journalists strengthened by the employment of computerised technology
in newspaper production. Also, for example, coalminers and waterside workers
experienced substantial changes initiated by capital in the forms of their
work, such as bulk handling and containerisation on the wharves, mine
mechanisation and a shift to open cut mining for export in Queensland. The
strength of their industrial organisation allowed them to retain some of the
control over production and employment they had previously won, but also opened
the way to the possibilities of exchanging job losses for sustained
improvements in the conditions of their employment and a narrower political
outlook for those who remained.[44]

The increasing
number of employed administrators and professionals, especially in the public
sector, also began to play an extraordinary part in politics in the working
class. Their strategic position was strengthened by state policies related to
economic regulation and the provision of education and welfare. Their
unionisation grew substantially,
their union activity also tended to be more militant, and many of their unions,
which had inherited the forms of professional associations, reorganised more as
industrial organisations. Although their unions were mostly not affiliated to
the ALP, by 1981 about half of the party’s employed members came from their ranks,
while manual workers, half of them tradespersons, constituted one-third. In Victoria, twenty
percent of the membership came from among teachers alone, whose numbers,
approximately 1600, probably constituted many if not most of the politically
active part of that occupation. Teachers and other white-collar workers were
often the key to a ruralparty
branch being active.[45]

The labour
aristocratic stratification at the same time also acquired a new ethnic
character. The upper stratum of the working class was largely born in Australia
or Britain. These workers’ positioning was largely guaranteed through the
labour movement’s inclusion in the political accord with regard to the mass
immigration for three decades after World War II, from which eventually flowed
the formal breakdown of the old White Australia policy. Those migrant workers
who lacked English language skills, on the other hand, tended to be in the
lower stratum and dominate employment in labouring and process work. This
position did not push these workers to the periphery of the economy,however: they were central to
commodity production. They were also more highly unionised than other workers, at
least by 1982, when sixty per cent of employed migrants from non-English
speaking backgrounds were union members. Yet unions had only begun to accept
their responsibilities to these members in the 1970s.[46]

The change in
the unions’ approach to the participation of their migrant members was one
aspect of the development of workers’ activity and organisation in the
workplace in the 1970s. Two strike waves peaked in 1974 and 1981, then declined
in periods of rising unemployment as a result of cyclical economic recession. A
variety of workers were involved in strikes and other industrial action,
including women seeking non-traditional jobs,public sector professionals and clerical officers and non-English-speaking
migrants. Stoppages in support of wage demands increased, as did actions for
political demands, which included the first national general strike, in defence
of Medibank, environmental “green bans” and a strike in support a gay student. Many
workers also campaigned for reduced working hours: at least initially, this was
posed as a means of job creation. Workplace representation, often organised in
shop steward committees or other job delegate bodies of a union or all the
unions in a workplace as an adjunct to official union structures, existed in
much of the metalwork and construction industries, among coalminers, printers,
and waterside and electricity workersand
in the Port Kembla steelworks, the Ford Broadmeadows plant (but at car plants
in SA, management and union officials had successfully combined against the
workplace organisation in the late 1970s) and parts of the public sector. The
key limitations of these efforts by workers were the concentration on job
regulation rather than policy-making and the relatively uncritical character of
the response to calls for support for action from union leaderships. Meanwhile,
among those leaderships, that of the metalworkers union, for example, had de-emphasised
the nationalisation strategy suggested by socialist perspectives to take a
stance on policy which asserted the union’s independence from political
parties. As well, Tom O’Lincoln’s account of the years of the Fraser government
is especially concerned that the ranks of the metals unions had not resisted
the no-extra-claims provision of the industry’s 1981 agreement, that rank and
file job organisation was not associated with political radicalism and that
shop committees were in decline by 1982.[47]

An understanding
of the situation of politics in the working class heading into the 1980s needs
to search deeper than an estimation of the strengths and weaknesses of labour
movement militancy at the time, however. The class’s various stratifications
and groupings condition the character and consequences of workers’ militancy.
The relationships of the class to capital’s blocs are the context in which
politics in the class develop. Society’s relations of production are the social
basis upon which the class struggle takes shape.

Working class
political consciousness is historically formed. Its radicalisation cannot be
defeated by means which, having been used, are exposed and exhausted. Its
opportunism is not short-term in nature either, being rooted in the monopoly
relations of production of a social formation and the benefits that are won
from superprofits, especially by the upper stratum of the working class. In Australia,
a site of monopolising capitals, a labour aristocracy had existed for more than
a century before the 1980s, and the opportunism that expressed the particular
interests of the stratum had successfully headed off challenges to its
domination. In the 1980s and beyond, the strength and capacity for development
of this element of capitalist class rule and the potential for working class
radicalisation would again be tested.

[2]. The first article in the series, “Engels and the theory of the
labour aristocracy”, appeared in Links No. 25. It considered the scope
and significance of the theory and its application by Engels to understanding
the politics of the English working class in the latter half of the 19th
century. The second article, “Monopoly capitalism and the bribery of the labour
aristocracy”, appeared in Links No. 26, and third, “The labour
aristocracy and working class politics”, in LinksNo. 28. They discussed Lenin’s development of
the theory, the controversies which surround the theory and the political
strategy and tactics Lenin proposed to counter opportunist influence in the
working class movement. The penultimate article, which surveyed the previous
discussion of the labour aristocracy in Australian labour historiography and
outlined the development of monopoly superprofits in Australia,
appeared in Links No. 30

[3]. Francis G. Castles, The
Working Class and Welfare: Reflections on the Political Development of the
Welfare State in Australia and New Zealand, 1890-1980, Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1985, p. 103.

[4]. Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers:
Capitalism and the Common People in Australia, 1788-1914, Melbourne: Oxford
University Press, pp. 162-63, 175-176; Terence H. Irving,., “The roots of
parliamentary socialism in Australia, 1850-1920”, Labour History, No.
67, November 1994, p. 101; RaymondMarkey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1880-1900,
Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1988, p. 46, and chapters 6, 8;
Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia,
4th ed., St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004, pp. 264-266.

[10]. Gary P. Steenson, Not One
Man! Not One Penny! German Social Democracy, 1863-1914, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1981, pp. 32-39, 54-68 and 83-91.

[11]. Verity Burgmann, ‘In Our
Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885-1905, Sydney: George
Allen & Unwin, 1985, chs. 3-5; Markey, Making of the Labor Party,
ch. 8; Dick Nichols, “The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales”, Socialist
Worker, Vol. 4, No. 2, March 1989, pp. 37-38; Bruce Scates, A New
Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press, 1997, ch. 2. Moroney is cited by Bede Nairn, Civilising
Capitalism: the Labor Movement in New South Wales 1870-1900, Canberra:
Australian National University Press, 1973, p. 168.

[20]. Geoffrey Blainey, The Rise
of Broken Hill, South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968, pp. 95-96; Bradley
Bowden, “The limits to consciousness: urban workers in the maritime strike of
1890”, in Ferrier and Pelan (eds.), The
Point of Change, p. 80; Raymond Brooks, “The Melbourne tailoresses’ strike
1882-83: an assessment”, Labour History,
No. 44, May 1983; Allison R. Churchward, “Attempts to form a union: the
employees of the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company”, Labour History, No. 42, May 1982; Alice Coolican, “Solidarity and
sectionalism in the Sydney building trades: the role of the Building Trades
Council 1886-1895”, Labour History,
No. 54, May 1988, pp. 19-20; Fahey, “Abusing the horses”, pp. 101-04; Robin
Gollan, The Coalminers of New South
Wales: A History of the Union, 1860-1960, Parkville: Melbourne University
Press, 1963, chs. 2-4; G. R. Henning, “Fourpenny Dark and Sixpenny Red”, Labour History, No. 46, May 1984;Kuczynski, Short History, p. 93;
Rupert Lockwood, The Miraculous Union: A
Hundred Years of Waterfront Unionism, Melbourne: Waterside Workers’
Federation, 1985; John Merritt, The
Making of the AWU, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 56; Markey, Making of the Labor Party,
p. 149; Rowe, “Robust navvy”.

[21]. Buckley and Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers, p. 184;
Markey, Making of the Labor Party, pp. 139-146, 319; John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales,
Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890-1910, Canberra: Australian
National University Press, 1976, pp. 31-32; Stuart Svensen, , The Sinews of War: Hard Cash and the 1890
Maritime Strike, Sydney: UNSW
Press, 1995, p. 238.

[23]. Macintyre, Labour Experiment,
pp. 36-38; Markey, Making of the Labor Party, pp. 1-2, 316; McQueen,
A New Britannia, p. 275; Andrew Wells, “State regulation for a moral
economy: Peter Macarthy and the meaning of the Harvester Judgment”, Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol.
40, No.3, September 1998, p. 379; John Wanna, Defence not Defiance: The Development of Organised Labour in South
Australia, Adelaide: Adelaide College of the Arts and Education, 1981, pp.
14, 21.

[32]. Wells, “State
regulation for a moral economy”, pp. 379-380. Cf. Buckley
and Wheelwright, who suggested the conditions existed “for a coalition between
organised workers and large manufacturers”—that is, a narrower settlement—and
that as a result “a large proportion of the labour movement” was incorporated
into the state apparatus. (No Paradise for Workers, p. 223)

[Jonathan
Strauss is a long-time member of the Democratic Socialist Perspective, a Marxist tendency within the
Socialist Alliance of Australia. He is currently a postgraduate student
investigating developments in the working class and its consciousness during
the Hawke-Keating Labor governments.